Published by Douglas Messerli, the World Cinema Review features full-length reviews on film from the beginning of the industry to the present day, but the primary focus is on films of intelligence and cinematic quality, with an eye to exposing its readers to the best works in international film history.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder | Angst vor der Angst (Fear of Fear)

What
is the problem with Margot Studte (Margit Carstensen)? She’s beautiful, the
wife of a clumsily loving husband who daily works and is studying at the
university at night, and is the mother of a beautiful young daughter and a
soon-to-be-born son. Their house has been, apparently mostly paid for my her
husband Kurt’s (Ulrich Faulhaber) family, whose mother, daughter, and
husband live upstairs and are willing to babysit at any second, besides daily
bringing in piles of cabbage, Brussel’s sprouts, and other food stuffs? If
they’re a little intrusive, they might be simply calmed by appreciative nods, and
a more careful closing of the front door, which the moody Margot generally
slams.

Obviously, everything’s wrong. Margot is
not only beginning to experience a wavy, watery view of the world around her
and, more importantly, of herself in the numerous mirrors that Fassbinder
offers up as decorative trinkets in her apartment, but she is suffering from a
kind of undiagnosed sense of imprisonment, which even her wall-paper seems to
confirm in its endless row of decorative 1970s paisley, arabesques and calicos.
Even their furniture, we later discover, is not their own choice. Certainly,
the potato pancakes, “stinky” cabbage, and numerous other typical German dishes,
regular delivered up by her Mother-in-law and her daughter are not appealing to
her or her family.

More importantly, she finds it impossible
to describe any of her increasingly disturbing feelings to her busy husband.
Although Margot almost manically attempts to distract herself through her
intense love of her daughter, she is everyday beginning to fall apart, fearing
for her own sanity.

Her kindly doctor (who also lives across
the street) insists nothing is wrong with her, and nonchantly proscribes Valium
and other drugs, to which Margot, in her increasing “angst of fear” begins to
consume her with greater and greater frequency.

To add to her fears, her own husband, at
moments, seems to doubt her sanity, and her brother-in-law, Karli (Armin Meier)
describes her swimming regiment (through which she daily attempts to control
her fears) as maniacal, reporting that back, of course, to her immediately
family. In fact, nothing that Margot does is not observed by her nosy relatives,
who like Nazi-era neighborhood snoops, note her increasing trips to a local
pharmacist, Dr. Merck (Adrian Hoven)—with whom she happily exchanges sex for
increasing dosages of drugs—and observes her bizarre behavior, including
regular street encounters with a truly local madman, Herr Bauer (Kurt Raab),
who recognizes her as developing psychological problems similar to his own, and
who accosts her, perhaps, out of sympathy, but in his constant following, seems
to be further threatening her stability.

Many of Fassbinder’s films demonstrate the
breakdown of individuals (particularly The
Bitter Tears of Petra van Kant, Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? and In a Year with 13 Moons), but Margot’s
situation is the closest of his work to a Hitchcock and reminded me of Mia
Farrow in Polanski’s 1968 Hitchcock-inspired Rosemary’s Baby. In fact, we wonder, supported through one of
Margot’s insults against the intrusive mother and daughter-in-law, whether her
new son, Jan, might not grow up to be another “cabbage-eater.” Certainly, given
the film’s self-absorbing fixation on the growingly mad mother, we rarely get
even glimpse of the new child after his birth, we can only wonder, will he,
too, be as monstrous as “Mutter” (Brigitte Mira) and daughter Lore (Irm
Hermann)?

Finally, even her ignoring husband cannot
dismiss the fact that his lovely wife, after she has seemingly attempted to
commit suicide, is now addicted to drugs and alcohol, and, after the local hack
doctor insists she is a schizophrenic, commits her to an institution. There, through
the help a friendly woman doctor and a healing patient, Edda (Ingrid Caven)
(who on-line critic Jim Clark has connected with the Eddas, the ancient source of German myths), Margot is healed—at
least temporarily. Although when she hears of the suicide of the local madman,
Bauer, she again seems the watery, wavy pattern that has first led her to
believe she was losing her sanity, I’d argue she has now become a survivor, a
woman who understands that she must fend for herself in a world that has long
been attempting to turn her into an infantile, a woman with no purpose outside
of motherhood and cooking—the movie began with her making a cake.

She and her daughter Bibi can now come
out of their shadows (throughout the film, Margot’s daughter stands behind
doors and screens, overhearing her mother’s intense interchanges with her
husband) and claim their rights in the relationship she has with Kurt. We
cannot know where that will end, particularly given Kurt’s reliance on his
monstrous family; but even Lore’s husband, Karli, has encouraged her to turn
away from the family through his simple gift of flowers. This beautiful woman,
who at film’s end has obviously turned to a career of typing, will clearly
survive—after all, the local madman, Bauer, has now died, and she, who has so
feared his presence, has been renewed by her brief interchange with fellow
females. If her view temporarily goes out of focus, her spirit, I would argue,
has been renewed after her outspoken battles with her mother-in-law and her
daughter. And, no matter what happens in her relationship with Kurt, she will
surely move on as a stronger individual.

That all of this was first presented on
German television—at least from a US perspective—is startling. Yes, Bergman—who
highly influenced Fassbinder—had presented even more involuted psychological
dramas on Swedish television, but to present such startling visions such as
this and later, Berlin Alexanderplatz,
to an audience which it was obviously critiquing, is fairly amazing, particularly
at a time when, just across the wall, in East Berlin just such family and
neighborhood surveillance was a daily occurrence and was still highly instilled
in the German mindset. In 1975, once again, Fassbinder was far ahead of his
times, in filming about the past—and a future of drug dependency—that was
amazingly prescient.